And You, My Love, Are Gone
by lovablegeek
Summary: S1 - Tosh shouldn't be mourning a traitor and a murderer... and yet. Tosh/Suzie - One shot


The phone rang at 4:30 AM, which wasn't entirely unusual. Torchwood meant being on call at all hours, a fact Tosh had resigned herself to years ago, so she barely groaned as she cracked her eyes open and reached for the phone she kept on the nightstand while she slept.

"What is it?" she said, without checking to make sure it was Jack. Few enough people called her anyway, and Jack was the only one who ever did at this time of the morning. She didn't quite manage to keep the grogginess from her voice, but came respectably close.

Jack, on the other hand, didn't sound groggy in the least. Jack rarely did, but there was a sharp edge and a tightness to his voice that chased away the fog of sleep more effectively than anything else would have. "I need you at the Hub _now_. Any alien tech you brought home, it comes back immediately and doesn't leave the base again, under any circumstances."

Tosh glanced unthinkingly to the data scanning device, lying in its silk bag on her dresser, her heart jumping in her chest. He couldn't have known about that, if anyone would have missed it she wouldn't have _taken_ it, but... "Jack, what's going on?" she asked, not certain she actually wanted the answer to the question, but asking was better than not knowing.

His voice didn't soften in the least, but it slid from sharp-edged anger to quiet, hard resolve. "Suzie's dead."

Her breath caught. The phone started to slip in her fingers, and she just managed to hang up before it fell to the bed, soundless.

* * *

Tosh didn't look at Ianto as she stepped into the tourist information centre, and he waved her through the door. Reaching the main atrium, she didn't look at Jack either, Owen or the woman from the other day, Gwen. She set the data scanning device down on the desk, head down, eyes fixed on anything but Jack's face. She should have felt guilty, somehow. She should have felt _something_, but somehow couldn't be anything but grateful that she didn't.

She sat down at her desk and quietly got to work, barely noticed when Ianto set down a mug of coffee on the desk beside her, and pointedly avoided looking in the direction of the morgue. She stopped thinking about certain things - a series of murders across the city, the bloody glove, the empty space at Suzie's workspace where she ought to be, a poem once left on her pillow.

She managed not to think of much at all through the day, beyond numbers and figures, the circuitry of an alien device that seemed to be malfunctioning, and a particularly difficult translation program, which was either an accomplishment or spectacularly unhealthy, emotionally speaking, and she didn't much care which.

It wasn't until Tosh returned to her flat underneath an angry grey sky that anger and hurt uncoiled finally and showed their teeth. Suddenly her flat was huge and empty. Suddenly the dark clouds outside her windows seemed to weigh down, crushing the air from everything. Suddenly her lungs ached and her throat burned, and she closed the door behind her before falling back against it, eyes closed against the tears that had been waiting all day to fall.

For a moment it occurred to her that she shouldn't lean against the door, that any minute she might fall, Suzie would come over unannounced, she had a key and Tosh never put the chain on the door for just that reason... A moment later she remembered why that wouldn't happen.

She should be seeing a few lines of poetry in Suzie's neat, elegant handwriting on a note on the fridge, or a message from Suzie waiting on her answering machine. There ought to be Suzie's voice calling from the other room, or Suzie walking up to wrap her arms around her.

Tosh let out a quiet, strangled scream that, if she was being honest with herself, came closer to a sob, and spun to thump the door with her fist. She shouldn't be crying. Suzie was a murderer and a coward... and Tosh _missed_ her.

She reached up, without looking, and slid closed the chain on the door. She no longer had a reason not to, after all.


End file.
